Appraiser of doom finds his niche

The so-called appraiser of doom, Randall Bell stands at the front of the Bundy Drive townhome where Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered. A wall covered with lush vegetation at the sidewalk makes it almost impossible to see the actual structure in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles.ARMANDO BROWN, FOR THE REGISTER

9/11 Memorial: Bell visited memorials around the world to appraise the 9/11 Memorial at the World Trade Center site.

Flight 93: Bell is representing the owner of the site where the hijacked plane crashed.

Bikini Nuclear Test: Bell helped the Nuclear Claims Tribunal determine how much compensation should be paid to property owners on Marshall Island atolls that were contaminated by radioactive fallout from a 1954 nuclear weapons test.

Deepwater Horizon oil spill: Businesses and other property owners hired Bell to assess damages from the 2010 oil spill that affected tourism across the Gulf Coast.

San Bruno gas pipeline explosion: Bell assessed damages to nearly 10 homes affected by the 2010 gas explosion near the San Francisco International Airport.

-- Jeff Collins

Few things hammer property values more than murder.

The Benedict Canyon home where Charles Manson's followers killed actress Sharon Tate and four friends has been razed. So was O.J. Simpson's 6,000-square-foot Los Angeles estate after the former defendant in two homicides moved out.

The Cleveland home where kidnapper Ariel Castro tortured three young women for a decade had the same fate as many other horrific crime scenes; a construction crew demolished it last week.

"Stigma is intangible, but it's very real. It's been recorded over and over again," real estate appraiser Randall Bell said. "You can bulldoze the property, but the stigma attaches to the land."

Bell should know.

For more than 20 years, the Laguna Beach real estate consultant has made disaster and tragedy his specialty. He focuses on how various ills – from landslides to terrorism to mass killings – impact real estate.

His current caseload consists of $5 billion to $6billion worth of impaired properties. Among them: a Las Vegas house where someone was killed, the United Airlines Flight 93 crash site in Pennsylvania, and Gulf Coast businesses damaged by Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The appraiser's past cases included the San Diego County mansion where 39 Heaven's Gate followers committed suicide, the Brentwood townhome where O.J. Simpson's ex-wife and a friend died, and the Boulder, Colo., house where 6-year-old beauty pageant contestant JonBenet Ramsey was strangled.

Bell has visited the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas; Hiroshima, Japan; Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; and Gettysburg, Pa., while appraising the Sept. 11 memorial site in New York. And he traveled to Chernobyl while assessing damage from a Bikini Atoll nuclear test in 1954.

Colleagues call him the "Appraiser of Doom" and the "Master of Disaster."

But Bell is far from a ghoulish guy.

The 54-year-old Fullerton native said he simply decided to try something different after getting his MBA with a specialty in real estate at UCLA in the early 1990s. After working his way through graduate school as an appraiser, the idea came out of the blue: He'd go from looking at property valuation to the flip side – devaluation.

"No one was looking at damaged property," he said.

Then came the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the Northridge earthquake, wildfires in Malibu and the O.J. Simpson case, all in 1994.

"My business just exploded," he said. "It turned out to be a lucky idea with really great timing."

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The so-called appraiser of doom, Randall Bell stands at the front of the Bundy Drive townhome where Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered. A wall covered with lush vegetation at the sidewalk makes it almost impossible to see the actual structure in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. ARMANDO BROWN, FOR THE REGISTER
The so-called appraiser of doom, Randall Bell stands at the front of the Bundy Drive townhome where Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered. A wall covered with lush vegetation at the sidewalk makes it almost impossible to see the actual structure in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. ARMANDO BROWN, FOR THE REGISTER
A wall covered with lush vegetation at the sidewalk blocks the view of the Bundy Drive Townhome where Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. ARMANDO BROWN, FOR THE REGISTER
A wall covered with lush vegetation at the sidewalk blocks the view of the Bundy Drive Townhome where Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. ARMANDO BROWN, FOR THE REGISTER

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